The average American watches five hours of TV a day. For YouTube, it’s more like five minutes–a fact which the folks at YouTube don’t like a bit. They think is due to it being too hard to consumer their service in mass quantities. So they’re launching a new service–which the company showed as a sneak peek back at Google’s I|O conference in May–called YouTube Leanback. (Yup, this is YouTube’s second new version of the day: I saw it and the new YouTube Mobile at a press briefing this morning.)

Leanback is an expansion of the basic idea in an earlier service called YouTube XL. It runs in any browser that supports Flash–iPads need not apply–and is designed to make watching YouTube feel a bit like watching a personalized TV channel with a really slick program guide that can be controlled by keyboard. Videos display in full-screen mode, and you press the Up Arrow key to search and the Down Arrow key to reach playback controls, a feed of videos tailored to your interests (which are search results if you’ve just searched) and a browsable directory of videos in major categories.

Unlike the revamped YouTube Mobile, Leanback isn’t trying to give you all the power of standard YouTube in a new format. It’s YouTube stripped down to its bare essentials, and judging from my brief hands-on time with it so far, it’s pretty nifty. Folks who have connected a PC to an HDTV will obviously be intrigued by Leanback–and it will run on Google TV devices once they’re available–but YouTube execs at the briefing said they think people who watch the service on a laptop or desktop PC display will like it, too.

Here’s YouTube’s video demo of Leanback–if you try the service, let us know what you think.

YouTube is launching a new version of its mobile site today for HTML5-capable smartphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. I saw a demonstration at a press briefing this morning, and it looked like the most YouTubey mobile version of YouTube to date, with most of the major features of the full-blown version of the service, playback of videos within the browser (rather than in an external media player) [CORRECTION: I got the previous point wrong], and higher-quality video than is currently provided by the YouTube apps for iPhone and Android. Judging from the demo, it’s extremely snappy for a Web-based app–screens popped up as quickly as they would in a local application.

It also has a user interface that’s designed to be as touch-friendly as possible, without demanding the user to poke at the screen very precisely–Product Manager Andrey Doronichev even conducted part of this morning’s demo using…his nose.

The new YouTube Mobile looks cool, but it’s most interesting as a salvo in the war between local apps (a form of software championed by Apple) and Web-based ones (Google’s bread and butter). When Google writes iPhone apps–like, say, Google Voice–it’s at the mercy of Apple. When it creates browser-based services, it doesn’t need to seek anyone’s permission to distribute them to every iPhone user who cares to give them a try. And with YouTube, at least, it looks like there’s no particular advantage to writing an iPhone app–the Web-based incarnation works at least as well as a piece of native software would.

Even if the unique challenges of getting into the iPhone App Store weren’t an issue, there’s much to be said for YouTube being a Web app rather than a local one. With a Web app, YouTube can roll out new features on as aggressive a schedule as it chooses, instantly putting them in the hands of everyone who uses the service. It can’t do that with the YouTube app for Android, and the one for iPhone is completely out of its hands, since it was written by Apple. (For what it’s worth, a YouTube exec at the briefing I attended said he hopes Apple continues to update its YouTube app, and that YouTube would be happy to help.)

You gotta wonder: How long will it be until Web apps are capable of doing nearly anything a local app can? It’s not going to happen in 2010, 2011, or 2012…but it will happen.

Here’s YouTube’s blog post on the new YouTube Mobile. One surprising note: The company says that it hasn’t finished polishing up the service to work well in Safari on the iPhone 4.

YouTube is a wonderful promotional tool for video games, among other things, but as a gaming platform itself? A couple creative examples show that it’s possible.

To promote both the Chrome Web browser and Adobe Flash, which is now integrated into the browser, Google put together Chrome Fastball. It’s a set of simple mind games using APIs from other websites, all strung together by video clips of a Rube Goldberg device. So, at one point you must answer a trivia question on Twitter (anonymously), and at another point choose the best way to travel between two points on a map. Each successful answer moves your ball along the contraption towards the finish line. It’s a cute little game that actually works just fine in other browsers, too.

The funny thing is, Chrome Fastball isn’t the only YouTube game I played today. To celebrate the premiere of Twilight: Eclipse, Benny and Rafi Fine created Twlight Eclipse: The 8-Bit Interactive Game. This series of YouTube videos is actually a choose-your-adventure with NES-style animations and audio. At the end of each clip, players must make decisions that send them on multiple branching paths. It’s a nice way to waste an afternoon even if you’re not into young adult vampire drama (I still can’t believe that’s a genre).

Obviously, YouTube can’t have full-blown games with controllable avatars, because it just wouldn’t be YouTube anymore at that point. But there’s potential to do some clever things with the interactivity YouTube does allow, as these games show.

One last note: Both games back up Google’s point that Flash is still relevant; neither one works on the iPhone’s HTML 5 version of YouTube.

Are the more obscure content offerings not doing it for you on your Roku? If so, perhaps the limitless video (of varying quality) found on YouTube makes for a better channel. I first caught wind of YouTube on Roku over a year ago. But it then seemed that Google changed their YouTube API and/or licensing terms. Followed by nothing. Until today…

Continue reading this story…

A U.S. District Court Judge has ruled in favor of Google and against Viacom in the latter’s lawsuit over copyrighted videos on YouTube. Seems that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act–a law which usually seems to work in favor of copyright owners–absolves Google of blame for unauthorized uploading of videos as long as it deletes specific examples it knows about.

I’m not reflexively anti-giant media company, but it was tough to side with Viacom in this case. It says it plans to appeal, so it’s not over just yet.

It’s not going to replace Premiere, Final Cut, or iMovie anytime soon. But YouTube has added a very basic Web-based editor–and given that some of us mostly do very basic video editing, it sounds handy.

Rickrolling: Annoying, funny, and…surprisingly interesting:

Via: Online Schools

YouTube is celebrating its fifth birthday–and the fact that it now streams two billion videos a day. (Just thinking about it, it’s disorienting to remember that we lived without it, and its rivals, a mere half-decade ago.)

The streaming rental industry is getting ever more crowded, and now it’s going to have to make room for at least one more. YouTube has seemingly launched an streaming rental service, offering movies and television shows for anywhere from 99 cents to $3.99. Content would be viewable in a 48-hour window following purchase.

While most of the content available appears to be from independent, small studio and Bollywood sources, I spotted several Lionsgate movies in the list. Recent hit Precious and Brothers are currently being featured, and the service had a few catalog titles, including the Saw movies and 3:10 to Yuma.

Television show content does not appear to come from any major American network. YouTube has not officially announced this service as of yet, and it may just be that the weak offering here could be a result of this merely not being ready for prime time.

YouTube had previously experimented at the beginning of the year with $5 rentals of Sundance titles. The offering did not do so well, likely making the site much more than $10,000 or so in rental fees.

As I mentioned earlier, any offering from YouTube runs into the reality of a small yet increasingly crowded market. If the service wants to be successful, it’s going to have to ramp up its offerings quickly, as Netflix is currently king in this space. That said, the extreme popularity of YouTube itself works in the service’s favor.

We’ll have to watch this in the coming months to see the site’s next moves, and if it begins to strike hardware deals to bring the service off the computer screen and into the living room. After all, who wants to sit in front of a computer screen for two hours to watch a movie?

Back in January, YouTube started letting users opt-in to a new streamlined interface. It’s now happy enough with the results that it’s rolling out its new video page to everybody. I attended a press briefing at YouTube headquarters this morning at which company executives showed off the revisions, explained the thinking behind them, and said that all users should see them show up by 7pm PT tonight.

The execs told us that there are two types of YouTube users: casual ones who just want to watch a video, and dedicated fans who comment, create subscriptions, and otherwise dig into the site’s features. The new design tries to satisfy both groups, to turn the casual users into fans, and generally make watching lots and lots of videos so easy and addictive that everybody spends more time on the site.

At first glance, the new look doesn’t look all that new: The site’s essentially YouTubiness is intact, and there’s still a lot to do. But over the past few years, YouTube has added new features at a fast clip, and they’ve usually been crammed in wherever there was some white space on the page to spare. Goal one of the new interface was to simplify: It’s got many fewer links and less use of borders, gray shading, and other trim that isn’t completely necessary.

Some stuff has been moved around, too: The details on the uploader are now above the video rather than to its right. YouTube says that makes them more prominent, and also lets the site devote all the space to the right of the video player to other videos the visitor might want to watch, such as related videos, music-video mixes, and subscriptions (which now follow you around the site).

Continue reading this story…

Am I the only one who finds the current public squabble between YouTube and Viacom a tad unseemly? The opening briefs in Viacom’s copyright suit against YouTube were made public yesterday, and YouTube used the occasion as reason to post an item by its chief counsel accusing Viacom of secretly uploading its stuff “for years,” going out of its way to make it look pirated. Viacom has responded with a brief statement saying that YouTube’s founders thought their site needed to “steal” content to prosper; it doesn’t deny YouTube’s charges, but says they’re a red herring.

I’m not a judge, a lawyer, or an intellectual-property expert; neither are most of the folks who the YouTube and Viacom items are aimed at. That said, Mike Masnick of Techdirt has a good pro-YouTube analysis. And he links to the Hollwood Reporter’s coverage, which sides with Viacom.

Continue reading this story…

Has YouTube ever done a truly sweeping redesign? If so, I don’t remember it. Mostly, I think of the scads of features the site has added–many of which are useful, but all of which have led to a cluttered experience.

Today, YouTube is launching a major makeover of its video playback page, based on feedback from users. For the moment, it’s not replacing the old one–it’s an opt-in feature which you can get by going here. The company says the plan is to get further feedback from users and tweak it further before it becomes the default interface

The major goals were to reduce the amount of wordage and graphics that weren’t completely necessary; to make the most popular features easier to find; and to keep the emphasis on the video being viewed (which could be either hilarious or sobering) rather than the interface. Even the site’s “Broadcast Yourself” slogan is gone in the interest of streamlining.

Also gone in the new version: star ratings. (Instead, you give a video a “Love It” or (“Thumbs Down”) rating. All in all, the site looks much more like a product of its parent company, Google.

Here’s the new look:

And here’s the older, busier version:

The company says that for this first version of its new look, it tried to err on the side of taking things away and removing labels–even the comments no longer have a header explaining that they’re comments. If they get feedback that any of the changes went too far, they may backtrack a bit.

YouTube hasn’t completely redone the other important part of the site–search results–but it is experimenting with a new format that leaves the video you’ve been watching onscreen in a smaller window when you search for something new:

It’s going to take a while for me to get used to some of the changes–like the information about the video’s uploader moving from the right-hand side and being split up into chunks above and below the video–but overall, this looks like good stuff. It’s certainly less claustrophobic than the old version.

If you check it out, let us know what you think.

YouTube, the Web’s biggest video destination, has started supporting the Web’s newest way to watch video: HTML5, the nascent standard that includes video features that eliminate the need for Flash or other plug-ins. It’s so nascent that YouTube’s experimental implementation only works in Chrome and Safari, but if you use either of those browsers and are intrigued by the idea of Flash-free video, check it out.

YouTube: the year in review.

Google: only 16,000 Android apps.

More Google Fast Flip sources.

24GB of RAM–only $1300!

Twitter on the Zune HD.

Continental planes getting Wi-Fi.

Bing comes to the iPhone.

________________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

I’ve written periodically of my flirtation with dumping cable for an Internet-only approach to my TV watching. I haven’t, however, pulled the trigger–mostly because cable still has a lot of live programming, such as news and sports, that I can’t replicate over the Net alone.

That’s why I’m intrigued by Sezmi, a TV service that’s announcing that it’s rolling out to its first real customers (in Los Angeles). The service aims to provide a more personalized, Net-savvy, inexpensive alternative to cable and satellite–complete with the real broadcast and cable channels you can’t get from Apple TV, Roku, or Vudu. It does so via a 1TB DVR/set-top box that provides access to three types of TV sources: broadcast stations, cable channels, and Internet content. (It snags the first two kinds over the air, via a powerful antenna in a box that looks like a loudspeaker: Sezmi simply grabs local broadcast channels as is, and the company is leasing spectrum from local broadcasters to transmit cable channels–including both standard-def and HD.)

Continue reading this story…

I use AOL’s instant-messaging network all day long, but I’m not sure when I last used the AIM software itself (with the exception of the iPhone version). I’ve associated it with feature bloat, annoying ads, and a sort of old-timy, Web 1.0 feel. So I long ago switched to other clients that support the AIM network (Apple’s iChat when I’m on a Mac, GAIM when I’m on Windows, and the Web-based Meebo anywhere and everywhere).

But AOL showed off new desktop and iPhone versions of AIM this morning at TechCrunch50. The new AIM is distinctly less clunky and annoying, and it aims to be not only an IM client but also an aggregator of social networking info (aka your “lifestream”) from other services, too. The new versions officially launch next week, but betas for Windows and Mac are available right now and the $2.99 paid iPhone version is live on the App Store.

I’m trying the Mac beta, and it’s a Mac AIM client I’d actually use (hey, I’m chatting in another window even as we speak). It seems to lack some of the irritations that drove me away long ago, like ads popping up without warning. As for the social networking features, AOL has added support for Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Fickr, Twitter, and YouTube. It combines them all in a tab called Lifestream, lets you view all of them in one river of updates, or one service at a time, and permits you to broadcast your AIM status to other services whenever you update it. It also displays photos and videos from your pals directly in the AIM window.

There aren’t many things harder to do than elegant integration of disparate social networks–actually, I’m not sure if anyone’s really nailed it yet–and AIM’s implementation, in this beta at least, is imperfect. I’m not sure why you configure networks in your browser rather than in AIM preferences, for instance. And if you’re the type who loves high-powered apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic, you’ll find the AIM client’s support for other networks to be bare-bones at best. I doubt that any semi-serious Twitter user will rely on AIM as his or her only Twitter client, and about 95% of the things that make Facebook interesting (the full-blown wall, events, third-party apps, etc.) aren’t available.

The new AIM makes most sense for folks whose social lives are centered around AIM rather than Twitter or Facebook or another network. There are millions of those people, so it’ll be accomplishing something if all it does is make them happy. As it will be if you can use the new clients without gnashing your teeth and seeking alternative clients less likely to drive you bonkers.

I’m still looking for the ideal social-networking aggregator, but so many companies are working so hard on the challenge that I’m optimistic that I’ll find one that works for me sooner or later.

As for the new AIM client for the iPhone, I’ve downloaded and installed it–but every time I try to view my Lifestream, I get an error. I’ll check back later.

AIM network users, are you still using the AIM client? If not, why not? If you try the new versions, let us know what you think.